I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Friday, October 7, 2016

What’s Going On With South Australia’s Power?

SOUTH Australia has the most expensive
electricity in Australia and has been prone to blackouts, what exactly is going
on there? Premier Jay Weatherill was quick to point out that the latest
blackout, which saw the entire state plunged into darkness, was a “weather
event”, not a “renewable energy event” but it has drawn attention to issues
with the state’s electricity network.

The state gets 40 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy but
there are now concerns wind and solar will not be enough to provide reliable
electricity. Today, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said several state Labor
governments — not just in SA — had set “extremely aggressive, extremely
unrealistic” targets for renewable energy use.

“If you are stuck in an elevator, if
the lights won’t go on, if your fridge is thawing out, everything in the
kitchen is thawing out because the power is gone, you are not going to be
concerned about the particular source of that power,” he told reporters in
Launceston. “You want to know that the energy is secure.”

While Federal Energy Minister Josh
Frydenberg has acknowledged SA’s blackout was caused by a once-in-a-50-year
weather event, he said it still raised broader questions about the future of
energy security in Australia.

He said he would will bring the state
and territory energy ministers together within weeks to discuss ways of
avoiding the cascading effect of power blackouts and how to better manage the
shift to renewable energy.

So does South Australia have a problem?

WHAT HAPPENED ON WEDNESDAY?

Mr Weatherill says the precise sequence
of events was still being worked through but the blackout appears to be related
to severe “almost cyclonic force winds” and 80,000 lightning strikes that
battered the state about 3.48pm.

The strong winds and lightning strikes
look to have damaged power transmission towers, mainly in the mid-north of the
state including near Port Augusta and Port Pirie. This seems to be backed up by
photos of a toppled electricity tower near Melrose, north of Adelaide, which
have lit up social media.

ElectraNet, which owns the transmission
towers, said 23 towers appeared to have been damaged, including three out of
the four transmission lines moving power between Adelaide and the north of
South Australia.

“We haven’t done a complete assessment
yet but there’s a strong suspicions that (the damage) is from wind, some might
have been from lightning as well,” a spokeswoman told news.com.au. In addition
to this, the distribution network (which are the electricity poles and wires
that deliver lower voltage power to people’s homes and businesses) were also
damaged.

The damage triggered an automatic cut
at the interconnector, which as the name suggests, links South Australia and
Victoria. It allows the states to share electricity, and acts like a large
surge protector, which automatically cuts off supply if there is a fault in the
system to protect the entire system from being damaged.

SOUTH AUSTRALIA RELIES ON VICTORIA FOR POWER

South Australia gets its electricity
from wind, solar and gas but no longer has coal power after Alinta’s Northern Power
Station and Playford A station at Port Augusta closed in May. It followed the
closure of the Playford B in 2012.

At the time, Australian Energy Council
chief executive Matthew Warren said the closure would leave the state with less
back-up energy on days of high demand. The state would need to rely on
renewable energy and the interconnector which provides electricity from
Victoria for base-load power.

“The reality for South Australians is
that we’re in uncharted waters,” Mr Warren said in May. “There’s an increased
level of risk that we really haven’t seen before anywhere in the world, so it
doesn’t mean we’ll have more blackouts, hopefully if we’re smart we can sort
out solutions so power supply can be the same as usual, but it’s an increased
risk.”

This week’s blackout was not the first
time South Australia has felt the impact of losing its supply from Victoria. It
also experienced a blackout in some parts of Adelaide, Barossa Valley, Port
Pirie and west coast region late last year. That was blamed on the failure of
the interconnector.

Electricity supplier ElectraNet said
the disruption was caused by an incident at a substation in Mingboll, in the
state’s southeast that blocked supply from Victoria. It took about three hours
to restore power to about 110,000 customers.

ElectraNet acknowledged South Australia
had relied on Victorian power for a long time. “We always rely to some extent
on the Victorian interconnector, it’s been there for some 25-30 years, it is
part of our supply mix,” an ElectraNet spokesman Paul Roberts told ABC at the
time.

“Many times other supply will kick in
and there’s always stuff on standby, but in this case it may well have been the
size of the load.” The South Australian government has already flagged its
intention to seek more power from other states, including NSW.

Mr Weatherill announced a $500,000
feasibility study this year into building a new interconnector to link it with
other eastern states. Mr Weatherill said he hoped this would bring down
electricity prices in South Australia, which are often the highest in
Australia, and would also open up the possibilities for the state’s renewable
energy to be shipped to other states.

Electricity prices spiked in South Australia in July costing one cement
maker $3 million, according to The Advertiser. Prices reportedly surged to
$14,000 a megawatt hour (they are normally below $100) after gas prices jumped
while the interconnector in Heywood was undergoing an upgrade.

SA Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis was
forced to plead with the Pelican Point gas-fired power station to produce more
energy to supply businesses on the verge of shutting down.

TOO MUCH RELIANCE ON RENEWABLES?

The closures of the Port Augusta power
stations was partly blamed on the rise of renewable energy sources and an
oversupply of power in the National Electricity Market. At the time, SA
Manufacturing Minister Kyam Maher described the market as holding more capacity
than was needed to meet demand.

In 2014, South Australia managed for the first time to get more than 100
per cent of its electricity needs for a working day between 9.30am to 6pm, from
a combination of wind and solar energy. Overall it gets more than 40 per cent
of its power from renewables, and has a target of 50 per cent to be achieved
within 10 years.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has
said he thinks SA is too reliant on renewables and independent SA Senator Nick
Xenophon has called for an inquiry into what happened. Mr Xenophon said South
Australia had become the “laughing stock of the nation” because it didn’t have
power on Wednesday. He wants to know whether the blackout could have been
avoided.

But Mr Weatherill has blamed people’s
“political agendas” for the “ignorant remarks”, noting that Mr Joyce hated wind
farms. When asked whether SA could still have had power if it still had its own
coal-fired baseload power, Mr Weatherill said no.

“It’s a misunderstanding that there’s
no baseload power,” Mr Weatherill said. “The baseload power was operating in SA
at the time this event occurred. If this had happened 20 years ago when there
was no renewable energy, the same thing would have happened, that’s the advice
we’ve received from the Australian Energy Market Operator. I mean this is a
weather event, not a renewable energy event, and the truth is this, when there’s
a crisis people pull out their agendas.”

While Mr Xenophon wants the Australian
Energy Market Commission to carry out an independent analysis, Mr Weatherill
said the government would already look into the circumstances of the blackout
and how it responded. He said the Australian Energy Market Operator would also
analyse the technical issues and it’s likely the Energy Council of energy
ministers would have an inquiry in due course.

Energy expert Andrew Stock, a member of
the Climate Council, dismissed attempts to blame renewables for the blackout as
opportunistic and irresponsible. “Storms can knock out electricity networks no
matter where the power supply is coming from,” he said.

At the time of the blackout, 1000MW of
wind power was being fed into the South Australian system. The council also
warned the SA storm event is a sign of weather to come. “The atmosphere is
packing much more energy than 70 years ago, which contributes to the increasing
intensity of such storms,” council member Professor Will Steffen said.

Intense rainfall was projected to
increase in Australia and had already increased at a global level. “This is a
prelude to a disturbing future, and it’s only going to get worse if we don’t
address climate change.”